Needless to say, both Zack and I ate our words a few weeks later when Jack began his fatal seizures. Max, Zack, and I were all gathered around Jack's bed, watching him from above with worried faces. Trying to be so utterly stoic, I reminded Zack that if anyone saw Jack in the disturbing condition, they would feed him to the anomalies. Yet, our conversation was cut short by the interruption of a nightly janitor. Instantly, we all scrambled for our beds, watching the black man who pushed his cart down the aisles, mopping the floors with a sickening splat of his military mop.
As he came upon the seizing Jack, he paused and crouched down beside my brother, pulling a card out of his pocket. Pressing the card into Jack's listless hand, the seizures miraculously subsided, and Jack gazed up at the man, astonished and scared. "Pray to her," the janitor said, "she'll watch over you." And as soon as he had left, we all sprang from our cold beds to see what Jack had been given from the mysterious outside world.
"What'd he give you?" I asked, leaning over Jack as I tried to contain my excitement.
Staring in great perplexity at the card, Jack muttered, "You can see her heart."
Then Zack gave one of the most surprising comments I had ever heard from him: "She's beautiful." I would have burst out laughing and slapped the dumb fool across the head had Max's question of the lady's identity not provoked me.
Max wanted to know who "the blue lady was". It was then that I realized what a valuable piece of information Jack had been given. Gently taking the card from his hand, I eyed it over, now knowing what I could do to my squadron of brainwashed little soldiers.
"She's watching over us," I whispered to myself, and my belief in Her began.
None of us though, -especially myself-was prepared for the day when Jack collapsed out of line, falling into his last seizure. As the men dragged Jack away through a pair of flapping aluminum doors with his hands madly quivering, Zack shot me a cold glance as the realization suppressed itself over him that Jack would indeed be eaten by the anomalies. And, although Zack would forever deny his comprehension, he never again accused me of fabricating when it came to the monsters that clawed the basement walls.
Slowly, the gray hallways of Manticore dissolved away to leave me sprawled on the wet grass of the football field, where I knelt, hunched over and clasping my pounding head in my hands. Tiny hisses of steam trickled out of my panting body as I desperately tried to block the plaguing memories and ignore the pain Manticore had given me so long ago. After several minutes of the stillness during which I fought back tears and psychotic screams, a voice sliced crisply through the night.
"Ben, what are you doing now?"
Staring upward, I found myself gazing at a young boy who could only be, of course, Jack. There were scars across the top of his flayed skull, where they had obviously dissected him to learn more about our fatal seizures, yet other than the wounds, now brown with dried blood, he appeared to be the same brother that I deserted over ten years ago. Dressed in his standard Manticore hospital gown apparatus, he slowly walked toward me on bare feet and stretched his hand out to me, oblivious of the cold.
"Get up Ben, get up."
I blinked, not believing what I was seeing, and I shook my head, vainly trying to clear it of the mental fog that had suffocated my mind. "Jack?" I whispered incredulously.
He smiled, sadly almost, and nodded. "Yes."
"But…you're dead."
"Yes."
"Then, what are you doing here?"
"I came to talk to you."
"A little bit late," I snapped angrily, turning away from him. He had left me alone, and now he wanted to talk?
"We need to talk," he paused, studying me as I pouted on the ground. "Take my hand, Ben, the dead don't bite…you should know that by now."
I looked up at him, my eyes narrowed and yet gaping. Finally, with great hesitation, I reached up and clasped his hand in mine. He was internally cold and the skin was clammy, which reminded me of how Carlos' flesh felt before I had chopped it open.
With more strength than a boy ghost should have had, Jack helped me to my feet and led me over to the bleachers, where we sat down, side by side, and stared out over the football field. The moon had risen high in the sky, and faint wisps of sunlight were crawling across the top of the buildings, but the majority of the world was dark and silent. One of the guns was prodding me uncomfortably in the side, and my nose had somehow started bleeding in the time since I had undergone the flashback, but Jack-Kyle's son-still lay unconscious underneath the goal post with his heart openly exposed. I should have killed him when I had the chance.
It was a creepy sensation being seated next to Jack because every logical part of my brain insisted that he was dead. I had seen him dragged away into the world of the immortals. I had seen his hands violently quivering with frightful spasms. I had seen how his eyes were rolled back into his sockets, blind to the sobbing of his siblings. Nevertheless, he was beside me, dangling his puny little legs over the seat of the bleachers, while I rested my elbows on my knees, convincing myself that I couldn't have been trapped in some kind of transgenic purgatory.
"What are you doing, Ben?" His voice, hollow and devoid of any human life, erupted through the quietness, echoing around my eardrums.
"What is that supposed to mean?"
"The denial. The hatred. The killings."
"You know why."
"The Blue Lady?" Jack questioned, turning to face me with bloated blue eyes that were grotesquely pale in the moonlight that fell down from above.
I didn't answer him, and merely let a hiss of steam out between my lips in reply.
"I figured so," he sighed.
"And what? You want to slap my hands like I'm doing something wrong? You want to grind my face into the dirt like Zack has been doing for…months now? You want to tell me 'she's not real and never has been'?"
"No. I don't."
"Then what do you want?"
He didn't respond at first, as he chose his words carefully, and pressed his ghostly lips tightly together, making them appear white.
"What do you want, Jack?" I repeated, and I nearly flinched doing so; it was the first time I had directly spoken his name to him in over a decade.
"I came here to warn you," he whispered at last.
"Warn me?" I snorted. "Of what?" Nothing and no one could stop me. Not even Zack had been able to accomplish my submission when he had managed to make every other sibling bow down and extol his worldly deeds.
"If you don't stop this…these killings…something awful is going to happen to you."
"Like what?"
"Something awful."
"You came back from the dead to tell me that 'something awful' is going to happen to me?"
"No, I came back to tell you that you don't need to keep fighting for me anymore."
His words, since unexpected, hit me hard. I bit down on my lower lip hard enough to draw blood, unsure of how to retaliate, and shocked by his statement.
"Let the dead stay dead, Ben. And, you've got to face it: I am dead."
"They killed you, though."
"Who? Lydecker? His men?"
"The 'nomlies."
Jack laughed, almost in a cynical-but not mocking-fashion and looked up at the glittering stars, which were frosted with steaming clouds and smeared with sunlight. "'Nomlies can wear many faces."
"What is that supposed to mean?"
"Monsters in the basement should be the least of your worries right now. Monsters that lurk outside of the basement will come to get you…whether you want them to or not."
"They won't get me," I reassured him.
He arched an eyebrow and met my eyes. "Oh, really?"
"They haven't gotten me yet."
"They're just waiting. Biding their time, if you will. They'll catch up to you eventually…" Then, lowering his voice, he added, "They catch up to all of us…"
"And how would you happen to know so much?" I challenged.
He smiled his typical Jack smile-not at all degrading since he knew more than a person could ever hope to know, but at the same time warm and friendly as he let an outsider in on one of his many secrets. "Ghosts can see everything-can't they?"
I grunted in response, leaning over to spit out some acrid tobacco smoke, which had gathered down in my esophagus, between my feet. Angrily, I scuffed at the wet mark, pulverizing it into the cement with the toe of my black boot as the microscopic pebbles ground against one another to create a low screeching noise of grinding gravel. After a long moment of silence, Jack rose to his feet and stood off to my left, watching me through transparent eyes as I refused to look at him.
"You must leave this place."
"And go where?"
"Wherever. But you must leave here. There are people who are watching you, and they're getting closer."
"What about him?" I asked, giving a nod of my head in the direction of Kyle's Jack who was starting to stir unnaturally on the wet grass many feet away. A low groan trickled out of his beaten body as he collapsed back onto the ground.
"Leave him."
"But, for you-" I began.
"Leave him," Jack repeated, this time with the admirable fierceness in his voice that had beckoned Lydecker to him. "He's not me, Ben. Nobody ever will be for you. You have to accept the fact that I'm not coming back…alive, that is."
"I don't want you to leave," I whispered, wanting to rip my heart out on the ground because of the disgusting emotions that were creeping up the back of my throat.
"Ben-"
"No," I hissed, "you don't understand. You don't understand what's it like now that we're
out of Manticore. Nothing makes sense out here. You're supposed to fight for your rights, but they…the police…the people…would rather kill you than allow you to speak out…Zack…he wants me to follow him…wants me to bow down and kiss his goddamned ass…I'm not like them, Jack…I'm not like them at all." Slumping down off the aluminum bench, I crumbled to my knees, clutching my face in my hands, knowing that sobbing was now inevitable. "They're all so perfect…in their lives…in everything…When She stops believing in me…I don't know what to do…you're the only one who understands…the only one…" It was at that point in my babbling that I realized that Jack was no longer beside me. Looking up, I wiped at my nose with the back of my hand, sniffing inward as I did so, and found no trace that my dead brother had visited me.
Like everyone else in my life, he had left me.
Slowly, with a great amount of pain that I wasn't accustomed to, I rose clumsily to my feet, watching as Jack the Jock heaved himself upward. Reaching inside my coat, I clutched the handle of my knife, figuring that maybe by killing off this Jack, my brother would return to me, when a flash of neon blue caught my eye. Whipping around in a haphazard panic, I caught the vision of a darting human who realized that they had been spotted. Without a moment's hesitation, I knew that the Blue Girl was following me, for some odd reason.
Finally, I shoved the knife back inside my jacket, irritated and fuming, but I was unable to deny that Jack was indeed right in saying that people were after me. So, I turned towards the perimeter and tensed my muscles up just before launching myself over the chain-link fence. When I had landed on the opposite side and paused to glance back at the now conscious Jack, I heard the whisperings of a steel voice: "X5-493…493…493…"
